THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW WORLD ORDER

• First a comment on the war on terror.  We have heard it said repeatedly that the vast majority of Muslims do not support or desire the violence associated with al Qaeda.  However, that is beside the point.  The jihadists believe passionately that it is Islam’s duty to use any means necessary to compel the world’s submission to Islam.  George Weigel writes:  “For decades, an internal Islamic civil war, born of Islam’s difficult encounter with modernity, has been fought over such key modern ideas as religious toleration and the separation of religious and political authority in a just state.  That intra-Islamic struggle now engages the rest of humanity.”  We simply cannot ignore this brutal reality!  Weigel and many others have affirmed that we are in a war of ideas, “pitting two different notions of the good society against each other.  The jihadist vision claims the sanction of God.  The western vision of the free society, in which civility involves engaging differences with respect, has both religious and philosophical roots.”  Many Americans have lost sight of the origins of this powerful tradition; that indeed this view of freedom is rooted in a strong Judeo-Christian tradition.  Our challenge now is to explain to the world why religious freedom, civility, tolerance and democratic persuasion are morally superior to coercion in religious and political matters.  This war against jihadism is being fought on many fronts:  There is the military front (e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq, but also Chad, Mali and the Philippines).  But there is also an intelligence front, an energy front and a homeland-security front.  As Weigel argues, “The war against jihadism must be owned by both political parties.  Thus one measure of any presidential candidate’s seriousness is this: can he or she build a bipartisan coalition capable of sustaining the long-haul struggle required to defeat jihadist nihilism?”  This multi-fronted war against jihadism can become a vehicle for national renewal, as American citizens reconnect with the origins of our ideas of freedom and liberty, including freedom of religion.  It can also revitalize our energy policy as we “de-fund” jihadism by reducing dependence on foreign oil.  Defending human dignity across the globe can reignite the American dream and mission against the jihadist merchants of death.  The stakes are high and they cannot be owned simply by one political party.  This must be bipartisan and energized by the need for national renewal.  May God by His grace grant us this opportunity.  See Weigel’s essay in Newsweek (4 February 2008).

• Second, the recent sub-prime crisis has pointed out another brutal fact about this new order.  Power is moving away from the traditional centers of the global economy—the West—to the emerging markets.  These emerging economies are taking up a larger share of that economy—and, as they do, the US is becoming less and less important.  More than 3/4s of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves are now held by emerging-market countries.  Fareed Zakaria writes: “All this means that the political and economic clout of the West—and centrally of the United States—is waning.  You can see this reality in the discussions at Davos, [Switzerland] where Indian businessman, Russian officials, Saudi investment advisers and Chinese academics are moving to center stage.  Or consider George Bush’s trip to the Middle East last week.  After making several pleas that Saudi Arabia act to ease oil prices, the president had to accept a hard new truth.  He was the supplicant; power lay with the king.”  Wisely, Zakaria comments that “on the American campaign trail, the candidates talk about a world utterly unrelated to the one that is actually being created on the ground.  The Republicans promise to wage war against Islamic extremists and modernize the Middle East.  The Democrats deplore the ills of globalization and free trade, and urge tough measures against China.  Meanwhile Middle Eastern fund managers and Asian consumers are quietly keeping the US economy afloat.”  It is indeed a new world!!  See Zakaria’s powerful essay in Newsweek (4 February 2008).

• Third, consider the power centers of the new world order:  The United States, the European Union and China.  In the words of Parag Khanna, “The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game.  Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture.  The cold war, too, was not truly an ‘East-West’ struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe.  What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar world.”  Let’s examine each:
  
  
  1. The European Union:  The EU’s market is the world’s largest.  European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance.  Also, since 9/11, Asian students are doing their graduate degrees at an ever increasing rate in Europe, not the US.  
  
  
  2. China:  The East Asian Community is how China is establishing itself as the dominant force in Asia.  Also, from Canada to Cuba to Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals.  Khanna writes: “Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dambuilders and covert military personnel.  In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector.  The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product—and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find.”  China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is doing on its eastern and southern.  

What Khanna calls the “second-world countries of the world” include Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  If you include China, these nations hold a majority of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy’s most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth.  The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) accounted last year for 39% of the IPO’s issued on global markets.  In terms of corporate finance, BRIC countries are becoming strategic.

Khanna:  “The web of globalization now has three spiders.”  How then is America unique?  America’s $14 trillion economy is larger than the next four economies combined—Japan’s, Germany’s, China’s and Britain’s.  Russia’s economy is about the size of New York’s and Arizona’s combined; India’s is about half the size of California’s.  The  military power and the wealth of the US are certainly a part of its uniqueness, but its geography is also unique.  It is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the “peripheral center of gravity of geopolitics.”  The whole phenomenon of globalization seems to resist any kind of centralization.  The world is a complex, multi-cultural landscape filled with transnational challenges—terrorism, global warming and trade.  No single authority can mange these—not the US nor the UN.  The United States must recognize this new world order that is driven by globalization and its accompanying interconnectedness.  If we are going to remain competitive, we must recognize this new order and adapt to it.  It is no longer a unipolar world!  This will be one of the great challenges for the next president.  Protectionism, further isolation or intense ethnocentrism will not work in this new order.  From the perspective of this presidential campaign, neither political party seems to be living in the real world.  For that reason, it is difficult to be optimistic about America’s future.  With our huge debt load and loss of a competitive edge, we may actually be witnessing the decline of the United States.  Whether decline is true or not, one thing we do know—the 21st century will not be America’s century!

See Parag Khanna, New York Times Magazine (27 January 2008), pp. 34-67.

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